Epitaph On Wm Graham Esq Of Mossknowe - Analysis

A comic protest at the graveside

This epitaph praises William Graham by staging his death as a small crime against the world. The poem opens with a sudden shout—Stop thief!—as if the reader has walked into a street scene, not a memorial. That jolt matters: Burns turns grief into mock-anger, and the comedy becomes a way to say the loss is real. By making Nature the accuser and Death the thief, the poem suggests Graham’s value wasn’t private; it belonged to the ordinary order of things.

Nature’s missing “fool”

The central compliment is also the poem’s sharpest tension: Nature asks, How shall I make a fool again? On the surface, calling the dead man a fool sounds like an insult. But the line’s logic turns it into affection: Graham was a rare specimen of a certain kind of folly—likely the generous, harmless, unguarded sort that keeps social life humane. Nature even calls him her choicest model, implying his “foolishness” was exemplary, almost instructional, as if he showed how to live without pretension.

Death as theft, praise as teasing

The last claim—My choicest model thou hast ta’en—lands like a complaint that can’t be fixed. Death doesn’t merely end a life; it steals a pattern Nature can’t easily reproduce. The tone shifts from the lively accusation of the first line to a quieter bewilderment in the question, then to resignation in the final statement. Burns’s teasing praise lets the epitaph do two things at once: mourn a friend and keep him socially present, remembered not as a solemn monument but as an irreplaceable, beloved kind of human “fool.”